Know Your Rights

At first gloss, there are maybe two things that Ben Roethlisberger and Ernesto Miranda have in common. Roethlisberger is very rich, very famous, a two-time Super Bowl champion and was regarded, until a series of recent sexual assault charges fouled up what had become a very lucrative persona, as a prize example of the dull virtue of Ohio high school football – a big, unflappable, rocket-for-an-arm, all-beef archetype who could pull off remedial self-effacement in interviews and deliver a few lines in a television commercial. Roethlisberger is the fourth highest-paid player in the NFL, and he also looks like a boiled ham that has somehow acquired the ability to think highly of itself. That’s about what you need to know about Ben Roethlisberger.

Ernesto Miranda, on the other hand, was broke most of his life and could in just about every way have emerged, Freddy Krueger-style, from the bigoted, blaze-orange unconscious of leatherette Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. An Arizona-born – okay, that part fucks up Brewer’s narrative – career criminal, Miranda received a dishonorable discharge from the Army, drifted through Texas and later did federal time in the implausibly literary-sounding locales of Chillicothe, Ohio and Lompoc, California. The two things that Miranda and Roethlisberger have in common are a general ambient infamy and a place in the history books.

Roethlisberger is there because, in 2004, he became the youngest quarterback ever to win a Super Bowl. Miranda, for his part, is the reason why – had the Milledgeville, Georgia police arrested Roethlisberger on suspicion of sexual assault charges back in March of 2010, instead of posing for photos with him – the two-time Super Bowl champion would’ve been read his rights. It’s tempting to say that Roethlisberger and Miranda also have in common a predilection for coerced sex. But we can’t say that, really. Miranda’s 1963 conviction on rape charges in Phoenix was eventually set aside because… well, you know. And while Roethlisberger has been accused of sexual assault by two different women in the past 15 months, no criminal charges have ever been filed against him. So you could say that both Miranda and Roethlisberger should be presumed innocent, as they have never been proven guilty.

You don’t get to pick your martyrs on things like this. Miranda, who was stabbed to death in a dispute over a card game in Phoenix back in 1976, was a thoroughgoing butthead for seemingly his entire life, but the Miranda Warning is a popular and iconic component of America’s criminal justice system. (Well, popular among most actual citizens – the Roberts Court, as Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has written, has hand-picked cases involving sub-Miranda human nightmares in an attempt to chip away at the law.) Roethlisberger… well, I should probably stop comparing Ben Roethlisberger to Ernesto Miranda. But here’s why I did it in the first place: despite never being charged, let alone convicted, of any crime, Roethlisberger spent the first four weeks of this NFL season serving what was originally a six-game league suspension handed down by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

“My decision today is not based on a finding that you violated Georgia law, or on a conclusion that differs from that of the local prosecutor,” the commissioner wrote when he suspended Roethlisberger. “That said, you are held to a higher standard as an NFL player, and there is nothing about your conduct in Milledgeville that can remotely be described as admirable, responsible, or consistent with either the values of the league or the expectations of our fans.” So there’s that, and then there’s the not-picking-your-martyrs thing again.

There’s a reason why Goodell can do things like issue seemingly arbitrary suspensions and then, if he deems fit, reduce them. (There’s a hilarious bit of Wiki-trolling on Goodell’s page that I don’t want to spoil, but you should really find the hyperlinked words “personal conduct guidelines” and click them.) The NFL Player’s Association collectively bargained away its right to protest such decisions and allowed the league to rewrite the personal conduct policy to make it both more onerous and more amorphous, effectively giving Goodell the right to issue punishments of his choosing to players who violate an exceptionally opaque personal conduct policy. In exchange for that gesture of good faith (um?), NFL owners have proposed that the league set aside 18% less revenue for player salaries in the next collective bargaining agreement, despite record profits. They made that demand because they’re NFL owners and know no other way to be, but they did so secure in the same knowledge that insulates Goodell – no one in the NFL media is inclined to call bullshit on any of this.

That the authority-worshipping NFL media has treated Goodell to a vigorous and long-running rubdown isn’t surprising, necessarily – these are the same guys who insist on hymning loathsome rage-manatee Bill Parcells as a leader of men and subject home viewers to Jerry Jones’s alarmingly taut visage several dozen times per broadcast. Admittedly, it’s easy to think of greater human rights disgraces in the world than a lack of due process for the Jager-bombed clot of rapey deli meat that is Ben Roethlisberger. When enough witnesses describe a large, hugely wasted professional athlete following a 20-year-old woman into a bathroom with peen akimbo, I’m inclined to leave the principled indignance to professional civil libertarians and drill down on coming up with new ways to deride said wasted athlete. From each according to his ability and all that. But one doesn’t need to defend Roethlisberger – or like him, at all – to realize that there’s something sort of rotten happening here.

Roethlisberger represents a lot of things, some more flattering than others. Aesthetically, he’s something like the present-day apex of a certain model of quarterback – of the same demographic as the blue-collar Mitteleuropean-Midwestern gunslinger archetype, but a bit more fun to watch out of the pocket and, thus far in his career at least, impressively impervious to big-game pressure. Personally, though, Roethlisberger shows all indications of being an entitled, stone-stupid, epic scale booze-boner. By all accounts a pretty bad guy, in short, but – like Miranda – a disconcertingly good test case for the limits of authority.

The other players to have received long personal-conduct suspensions from Roger Goodell aren’t much more likable – Tank Johnson, DWI hobbyist and owner of a Branch Davidian-esque cache of unlicensed automatic weapons; Pacman Jones and his Zelig-like knack for being near heartbreakingly arbitrary incidences of strip club-based violence; Michael Vick, who is Michael Vick. All of them charged with crimes, all of them suspended by Goodell, all later reinstated amid the desultory trolling of daily newspaper columnists eager to see the tough-on-crime commissioner they’ve nicknamed Big Red (seriously) get still tougher. It has played, at times, like a suit-clad take on ESPN’s late, unlamented Sunday Night “Jacked Up” highlight segment – in which Stuart Scott clumsily slanged his way through the lighter side of helmet-to-helmet hits – only rewritten for the people who leave comments at the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion page.

There are exceptions to this, of course – Ray Ratto, the great San Francisco Chronicle columnist who also writes for CBS Sports, neatly unpacked the interlocking uglinesses of the whole affair back in April. But in a football discourse that deals almost exclusively in violent certainties and crude power, the commissioner’s mandate to protect the NFL’s brand from the players who comprise the actual NFL doesn’t get the criticism it deserves. In part, this is because no one wants to defend Ben Roethlisberger, staggering disgracefully, ween out, in the direction of something very terrible. I certainly don’t want to defend him – if you’re just joining us, I want to compare him to a goateed olive loaf – but I also take no joy in seeing the imperatives of brand management supersede even the appearance of due process in his case. It may make sportswriters feel sophisticated to talk about brands and messaging – in the same way that it presumably makes optic-obsessed political writer-types like Matt Bai feel like something other than cheapjack soothsayers – but it’s a terribly insufficient way to describe goings-on involving actual human beings. And, of course, it’s a pretty weak way to avoid talking about things – from the crudest behavior to the crudest applications of power – that make us uncomfortable.

Yeah, I just wrote all that on the week of the “Pics of Brett Favre’s Penis” story. I don’t know, either. But as you’re about to be reminded, my decisions generally deserve a pretty vigorous questioning. The good news would be that I finally defeated the coin last week, five weeks into the NFL season. The bad news would be that both I and the coin picked poorly even by the standards of inanimate objects. Again, I don’t know what to tell you. Sorry? Bet the coin? The limping, Zombie Saints look weirdly terrible? Anyway, as per usual: coin flips by Garey G. Ris, lines by Sportsbook.com, incorrect picks courtesy of my own over-thinking brain-piece.